Talk:Countries of the world
This page will contain a list of countries of the world, with links to official government websites, ministries of health, official bulletins and policy documents pertaining to Influenza A (H1N1), avian influenza and pandemic preparedness. I'm currently developing the page, using as a starting point the list of countries from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries. I hope to be able to incorporate the flags that appear on http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries into this page; it appears that this will require copying http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Flag onto Flu Wiki, which I don't know how to do yet. Later today I intend to copy in the material I've gathered so far. Due to problems with my satellite connection, any subsequent edits to this page that I make from my home computer will be attributed to whichever satellite IP I happened to have been switched to at that moment. --KathleenSeidel 14:35, 9 May 2009 (UTC) :I'll be copying necessary templates. I guess you can replace all the "status" stuff with health stuff. Try to keep clear of anything that might affect display. Do small edits with something meaningful in the edit summary (as you do most of the time) so we can backtrack easily if necessary. — Robin Patterson (Talk) 07:46, 10 May 2009 (UTC) ::I just finished plugging in the links I've collected so far. The one display-type change I made was to put the links into a right-hand column, which only entailed adding the column markup "|valign=top|" prior to the link list. I've also hidden all the notes at the end; they're not relevant to this particular page, but I didn't want to toss it all in the dumper just yet. ::Eventually, it might be good to divvy this list up into continental and regional groups, but right now while it's in its early development stage, it's convenient to have it all together in one place. --KathleenSeidel 21:18, 12 May 2009 (UTC) :Brave girl playing with "valign=top". So you have it under control, then. I've just arrived, so I've not looked at very much today. — Robin Patterson (Talk) 12:36, 13 May 2009 (UTC) ::LOL. It's WYSIWYG editors that drive me bananas, they leave me crying out for some good old-fashioned, DIY HTML. The editing got much easier and quicker once I started figuring out Wikitext. --KathleenSeidel 16:44, 13 May 2009 (UTC) Country data I've done nearly everything necessary for Afghanistan and a good number of the general templates that will make other countries fairly easy. But the flags will need individual image upload. We may discuss whether the name is enough without the flag. Goodnight. — Robin Patterson (Talk) 15:29, 13 May 2009 (UTC) :Voila. --KathleenSeidel 20:15, 13 May 2009 (UTC) ::That last response is the understatement of the week. File uploads at 10-second intervals... Now you can go to Project:Requests for adminship and put three or four tildes in an appropriate line. — Robin Patterson (Talk) 00:51, 14 May 2009 (UTC) :::Browser tabs made that happen; I lined my ducks all up in a row, then shot them one right after another. Tedious, yes, but over with in fairly short order. It'll be nice to have the flags to gussy up this page and individual country pages, too. KathleenSeidel aka-- 22:17, 14 May 2009 (UTC) Formatting & Clean-Up Right now the three columns of data on the page sprawl across a screen and a half of space; I have to scroll right (on the family iMac, my husband's laptop and my desktop PC) to be able to read the right-hand column. Although things may tighten up once all the templates are in place (and I can do another mass duck-shoot with those if I'm given admin status), I'm inclined to think that a two-column format would be more legible. I also don't think there's much need to dedicate an entire column to the sovereignty information (some of which can eventually be excised), since that's not the focus of this page. (For that reason, I integrated the "other states" into the main list.) The left-hand column could contain: *Name in English and the official languages of the country *Sovereign status *Memberships: United National (UN), European Community (EU), Pacific Community (PC), and other organizations relevant to this page, such as the World Health Organization (WHO), Pan American Health Organization (PAHO), Food & Agriculture Organization (FAO), World Organisation for Animal Health (OIE), etc. As it does now, the right-hand column would contain the links. In only a few instances would the left-hand column be longer than the right (i.e., PRC, France, Russia, UK and USA). The page contains a whole mess of tiny typos, now-superfluous footnotes and malformed links I plan to deal with next week. KathleenSeidel aka -- 22:17, 14 May 2009 (UTC) :I don't know why the display has widened. Still got the 25+20+55 percentages, which fitted the normal page width on my PC when I did it. There may be something in that first column that's pushing its width and, as you say, "may tighten up once all the templates are in place". And I agree about the 2-column aim. :Admin status will not give you any more ability with templates unless they are protected. Any you create (e.g. by copying from Wikipedia) will be non-protected until an admin here protects them. However, copying often requires tweaking because of the differences between us and WP, so I'd better do some more of those. Soon. Spend less time on Facebook, Robin! — Robin Patterson (Talk) 00:47, 15 May 2009 (UTC) ::It just occurred to me that the flags could also be displayed using a straight image tag such as "Image:Flag of Whatsit.svg|25px", the only current instance of such a tag on the page (which is why it's the only flag besides Afghanistan that currently displays). Making this switch would eliminate the necessity of creating all 280+ country data templates. If eventually it were desirable to create and use country data templates, it would be easy enough to switch the image tags back to template tags with a simple universal search and replace. I'm going to try this out for size on the "A" section; take a look and see what you think. KathleenSeidel aka -- 03:18, 15 May 2009 (UTC) :::Disadvantage is that the result isn't a link. See Afghanistan and Bahamas, both of which now have Template:Country data imported. Maybe your procedure can overcome that easily. If not, importing (just copy from WP source and paste) is not very hard, because there's almost nothing to change as far as I can see on these templates: you get at the bottom something like this: }} sl:Predloga:Podatki države Bahami :::and you add the wikipedia acknowledgment and either delete or comment out the other-language interwikis. You can add to fit in with our current Wikia-wide standards, but there's a thing at the top that covers that in an old-fashioned but OK way, so I think we can leave that out: }} :::Possible small hurdle is that some of them may have no interwikis and therefore no concluding "noinclude", so we would have to make one, tucked straight in after the final "}}"". To cover that, one could very simply have this page in a separate window to copy and paste the following either as a new item or replacing the existing "noinclude" (sacrificing any interwiki - which will only slightly disadvantage anyone, because they can get to it in only two clicks): t :::— Robin Patterson (Talk) 05:37, 15 May 2009 (UTC) ::::Good point. Once I actually got in there and started messing around with the flags, I realized that there were probably just as many keystrokes involved as there would be in creating the country templates, and much more room for error. So much for brilliant ideas born way past bedtime; might as well revert the lot of them. I don't expect to be working on anything Wiki over the weekend, but will come back to the page on Monday and dive back in. KathleenSeidel aka -- 11:52, 15 May 2009 (UTC) Regarding the width of the table, I suggest moving the extent section to the same column as the country data too give the two remaining clumns more width. Links prefer staying on one line, so instead the table is expanded beyound the screen width. Oset• 14:20, 15 May 2009 (UTC) Onwards and upwards? I should have rolled back KS's alterations to the A's before anything else happened. Now I guess I can paste the old versions in easily. Then I should do those couple of hundred country templates. — Robin Patterson (Talk) 06:56, 19 May 2009 (UTC) Ose's idea of pushing each column 2 cell under its mate in col 1 could be good. But I can't understand what happened to widen col 1, which was looking OK at 25% when I said it did. If we find the culprit, we may have a simpler way to restore column balance. — Robin Patterson (Talk) 06:56, 19 May 2009 (UTC) :Maybe the culprit was somewhere in those lines in the A's that I foolishly messed with the other night. I just changed them back to their original state, and the page narrowed considerably. (In fact, I just switched to Safari because Firefox kept hanging up on me, and on Safari the page only covers about 75% of the screen width.) When I was editing I noticed an extra bold tag at the end of one line; extraneous close tags are the sort of sneaky typo that can really mess up a page, I don't know how but they do. So mea culpa yet again. aka 11:43, 19 May 2009 (UTC) :Well, maybe not. It's narrower in Safari, but not in Firefox. I also found an exposed link and fixed that, but the display still sprawls on Firefox. Whatever it is, it'll be easier to hunt down once the list is divided into groups. I've just finished doing that offline, and will upload it all within the next few hours. Once that's done, I can go in and hunt down all the other typos, one of which may be throwing everything off. aka 15:57, 19 May 2009 (UTC) Page size Hard to manage. How soon might we split it somehow? --— Robin Patterson (Talk) 06:56, 19 May 2009 (UTC) :Real soon, especially since I finished making my first pass through the alphabetical list of countries this weekend (thanks to a speedy hotel connection), and finished adding the links to the page yesterday (that is, except for the U.S., which I'm saving for last). I'll divvy up the list into continental/regional groups this morning. aka 11:56, 19 May 2009 (UTC) ::First-rate. No sign of the column bug in Firefox 2 on the two I've looked at. — Robin Patterson (Talk) 00:14, 20 May 2009 (UTC) :::Thanks. I figured out the source of the bug by walking through the edit history. It appears to have been an encoding problem that happened on May 14, when I changed the horizontal rules from colspan=2 to colspan=3. I copied the entire page into TextEdit, did a universal search and replace, then copied the page back into the wiki editor. TextEdit munged all of the non-Latin characters and also many Latin characters with diacriticals. I didn't notice it because many of those characters were already displaying as question marks on my little old eMac. To fix the problem, I went back to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states then copied all of the messed up text into each of the new pages, directly into the wiki editor. :::PS, thanks for changing Australasia to Oceania; the latter was my first pick (and of course the most accurate pick) for a page title, but it was already taken, and I didn't know what else to do about it besides use a somewhat inaccurate title. aka -- 00:55, 20 May 2009 (UTC) OK, we have copies of nearly everything here on the continent pages. Not a problem until we look at updating info, when there will be duplication of work unless we can bypass that. If you want to keep both up to date, a bit of template-creation seems to be called for. It would facilitate the addition of the same material (updated whenever) to individual country pages, i.e. the same block of links on three pages. Something like . Making it a subpage of the country page will simplify its addition to that page (with the old slash trick). Making it an ordinary page means it's fractionally easier to "cite" on the continent and countries pages. Instead of using you prefix a colon. I'm not certain that that's enough advantage, but I'll do a test country. I'll try New Zealand this evening (or what's left of the evening). — Robin Patterson (Talk) 10:11, 21 May 2009 (UTC)